Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Brett Elston On Future Mega Man Virtual Console, PSN Releases

With six Mega Man games bound for the Nintendo 3DS eShop and the Game Boy Advance virtualconsole preparing to launch on Wii U, Capcom USA community Brett Elston (along with Greg Moore) are setting their sights on future possibilities. Here's the games Brett hopes to tackle next:

"No announcements obviously, but GregaMan and I are always looking for
ways to bring the back library to modern legacy stores (PSN, Virtual
Console etc). We bring up MML1-2 pretty regularly and if there's ever an
update on ANY version of them hopping platforms, we'll make it known.For
now though, I'm pretty excited about finally getting the GB/C games on
3DS. I'm still pushing on X3 and 7, and the fact GBA games are coming to
Wii U suggests our GBA titles may end up there as well. More as it
develops!"

Here's hoping all these games and then some get some much deserved love. Rights issues aside, I'm still rooting for Mega Man Legends. Battle Network and Zero on Wii U is pretty tantalizing, too. So many possabilities.

Not that I mean to nitpick or anything, but I think that having Game Boy Advance games as part of the Wii U's Virtual Console, rather than the 3DS', is a bad idea. Sure, the Wii U does have that neat off-TV play feature, but due to its limited range, that kind of takes away the GBA games' portability.

Um, nope. The 3DS is, in fact, perfectly capable of emulating GBA games. Remember the Ambassador program? Nintendo giving early 3DS adopters 10 NES games and 10 GBA games for free? It happened. Sure, they were missing a few cosmetic features, but that was only because of rushed development. Nothing a little more time and money can't fix.

Nope. Ambassador games ran through the 3DS DS mode. It is NOT natively running through the 3DS firmware itself. This is not the direction Nintendo wants to go in; they want to base future consoles on Wii U architecture so these Wii U GBA games will be backwards compatable with all future hardware. This includes savestates and other features. It is impossible to run savestates on the ambassador games b/c of the way they are emulated.

Got a source for that? There's no reason the 3DS wouldn't be able to emulate GBA games, even if the way it's been done previously somehow did rely on GBA hardware (which I'm fairly sure they didn't bother to include in the 3DS). They're treated by the system as 3DS eTitles, so there's no functional difference. "The 3DS can't do it right" is bullshit.

The 3DS definitely has the horsepower needed to do it. Nintendo simply doesn't seem to want to invest time and resources in coding a GBA emulator for the 3DS, for whatever reason. Heck, even the GBA emulator for the Wii U was outsourced: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/04/emulation_experts_m2_worked_with_nintendo_on_wii_u_virtual_console_gba_games

Someone needs to explain to me how some guy in his basement can code a perfectly functional Game Boy Advance emulator within a week -- one that has all the bells and whistles of the original handheld and a lot of useful new features, but Nintendo... a multi-billion dollar company... can't get their act together and code one for their own bloody handheld.

Mega Man 64 isn't happening, since that's just a slightly-downgraded port of Mega Man Legends.Mega Man: The Wily Wars uses a special chipset to save game data that even modern emulators can't see to crack (though it is of note, an alternate version of the game has been modified to save properly on all emulators), so that's also probably not going to happen.

As for the other two? No real reason not to re-release those. Other than "are people interested?" and "can we make money on this?"

As the original MML apparently can't be released, it would be good if Mega Man 64 could, as it doesn't contain the YAG school and Oronamin C references. (considering that those are the copyright problems)

Mega Man's Soccer is quite "unfinished", so it is unlikely. I think a new version a la Mario Sluggers would be better but considering how Capcom is lately, that more unlikely to happen.

Rock Board on the other hand is a good board game. A pity it was only released in Japan.

And from those consoles, the SFC Rockman & Forte is also missing in the Virtual Console.

Megaman Legends can be re-released. Just not on the PS Network. The reason Megaman Legends has never been put on the PS Network is because the games literally cannot have any of its contents changed. Since Capcom can't release it with the references and since it can't remove the references to fix that issue it cannot be put on the PS Network.

I know, just forgot to specify this case. It was released for PSP after all, with improvements! (both 1&2 have optional subtitles, and MML2 has no slowdown underwater, some of Roll's crazy prices reduced, and Episode 1 demo) Like Mega Man's Soccer, one new release would be better, but... *sigh*

The Ambassador Games do work and the saves work fine. I have all the games since I was a early 3DS owner. Zelda Minish Cap which needs a save file works excellent on the 3DS. Some of you really need to do more research before saying that GBA games won't work on the 3DS when it really does work.

Wouldn't mind seeing Mega Man & Bass on there even if we have to put up with the GBA port of it .... & having a faithful version of MM7 would be nice too since there were issues with the MM Collection version (the ending sequence especially!)